The landscape in the North Pole Dome crater in Western AustraliaCurtin University
A huge crater in Western Australia was created by an asteroid strike 3 billion years ago, according to a mineral-dating technique. This would make it the oldest impact crater on Earth – but other researchers have questioned its proposed age.
The North Pole Dome crater, also known as the Miralga impact structure, was first described by Chris Kirkland at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and his colleagues in 2025. They estimated that it could be up to 100 kilometres wide.
Kirkland and his team found a layer of rock containing cone-shaped features called shatter cones, which form only after a high-impact event, such as an asteroid strike. Their original study didn’t directly date this rock, but based on correlations with dated rocks in the layers above and below, they proposed that the impact was 3.47 billion years old.
This would make it more than 1.2 billion years older than the Yarrabubba crater in the south of the state, which is regarded as the oldest reliably dated asteroid-strike crater on Earth.
